


Noble Pursuit

by resjudicata



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Alcohol, Asexual Link, Character Study, F/M, Gay Urbosa, Gen, Gerudo Culture, Made Up Gerudo Words, Sheikah Culture, So much unrequited love, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 08:06:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17504804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resjudicata/pseuds/resjudicata
Summary: A Champion and a poet walk into a bar.  Spoilers for Kass’s song in Rito Village.





	Noble Pursuit

Kondo can hear her voice, deep and dignified, as soon as he enters the Castle Town tavern, and there’s no mistaking the mane of red hair he sees at the bar.  “First twist the safflina to release the oil,” Urbosa instructs the Hylian bartender, who does as she says, squeezing aromatic oil out of the lavender herb before garnishing her glass.

Kondo walks up to the bar, a few seats away from Urbosa.  He’s seen her before, at the castle, but he doesn’t want to bother her.  While there’s every reason to believe that he would recognize the extravagantly dressed Gerudo woman in the middle of Hyrule Castle Town, there’s less reason to believe that said Gerudo would recognize him.  She does anyway, and she waves him over.

“And another for my friend,” she tells the bartender.  The bartender obeys and immediately starts to work mixing another drink.

Kondo takes the empty stool next to her.  Urbosa looks down at him, and the expression on her face is warm, if not quite a smile.  Kondo is a man who likes precision in his words, and he’s not sure he’s ever seen Urbosa’s face in anything he’d classify as a smile.  He’s seen her smirk, glow, even throw her head back in laughter, but Urbosa is too regal for anything so mundane as a simple _smile_.

“Thank you for indulging me with a drink,” she says.  “I see so few familiar faces this far from the desert.  I like to enjoy the company of those I know when I can.”

“Of course,” Kondo says, as though he could have said no

The bartender places the second finished drink in front of Kondo.  Urbosa nods her thanks and tips a handful of gems into his hands.

Kondo looks skeptically down into the cup, which is filled with a pink slurry he doesn’t recognize.

“It’s a traditional Gerudo beverage,” Urbosa explains.  “The Noble Pursuit: crushed ice, fresh hydromelon, cool safflina, and enough volt cactus liqueur to knock out a Goron.  There’s nothing like one of these after a long, hot day, but they’re still good here, where the days are cool.”

“It’s not like Hylian drinks,” Kondo observes.

“No, it isn’t,” Urbosa agrees.  “But don’t worry. It won’t bite… much.”

Kondo rolls down his face mask and takes the cool cup in his hands.  He’s never been to the Gerudo Desert, but he’s heard stories. Even holding a drink like this must be heaven, in a place so punishingly hot.  “How about a toast?”

“A toast,” Urbosa agrees.

“What do the Gerudo say?”

Urbosa pauses for a moment before raising her own cup..  “Ne sakh’va.”

“Ne sakh’va,” Kondo attempts.

Urbosa taps her cup against Kondo’s, and they both drink.  The cool melon and minty herb tastes dance across his tongue, but the Noble Pursuit packs a punch.  Kondo is large for a Sheikah—he never trained for agility and speed, the way the princess’s guards have—and he’s sure he couldn’t handle a second one of these.  “It’s lovely,” he admits. “Strong. It could get the better of a man if he’s not careful.”

“That’s why it’s the drink of the Gerudo people,” Urbosa says with a chuckle.  “Your Gerudo pronunciation is good, by the way. Foreigners often have trouble with the ‘va’ sound.”

“I spend a lot of time thinking about words and sounds.”

“I’m sure you do.”

The bartender swings around then, rag tossed over his shoulder, to check on them.  “How is everything?”

“The best Noble Pursuit outside of Gerudo Town,” Urbosa says, like she means it.  “Not perfect, but quite good. It must be your ice. It’s very pure.”

“We have a Rito who flies blocks of ice down from Mount Hebra every morning.”

“And yet your hydromelon is overripe,” Urbosa teases.

“For you, my lady, we’ll put in a fresh order from Gerudo Town tomorrow,” the bartender replies.  Kondo doesn’t doubt he will. There’s a lot a tavern owner would do to keep a beautiful woman with a large sack of rupees returning to his establishment.  He turns to Kondo. “And you, sir?”

It takes Kondo a second too long to realize the bartender is talking to him.  He’s old enough for a tavern but not yet old enough that he’s used to people calling him ‘sir.’  “I’m good,” he stammers. “Thanks.”

“Ne sakh’va,” Urbosa repeats wryly, when the bartender leaves.  They both drink again.

“What does it mean?” Kondo asks, as he puts his drink down.

“‘May you enter.’”

“I like it,” he says.  “It’s a beginning. A wish for the future.  A blessing.”

“It’s a shortening of a longer saying,” Urbosa explains.  “I never much cared for the long version.”

“Which is?”

“It translates roughly to, ‘May the eyes of all the voe be on you when you enter the room.’”

“Ah.”  Put that way, the shortened toast’s possibilities seem narrower.

“Sometimes, a vai can have a bad habit of caring far too much for what voe think of her.”  Urbosa swirls the ice in her glass. “Some Gerudo never leave our territory in search of husbands.  Perhaps it’s fear. We all know the stories of what could happen when a voe tries to take too much power over us.  Perhaps they don’t see the point of having voe in their lives. But some vai let the mystery get the better of them.  If a voe has never looked at her before, then when one does, it can be… intoxicating. It’s all she wants.”

“But you don’t feel that way,” Kondo observes.

“Oh no.  I grew bored of the eyes of voe long ago.”  She glances to Kondo’s chest, where his robe splits and the tight Sheikah garb underneath leaves little doubt as to his gender.  “No offense.”

“None taken.”

Urbosa doesn’t need a blessing or a toast to have all eyes on her, regardless of gender.  Kondo’s heart already belongs to another, and yet he finds himself drawn to her. She’s fierce, beautiful, and commanding.  All of the Champions are like this, larger than life figures and living legends. Their power and responsibility are palpable, even if they all wear the role differently—Link with silent stoicism, Daruk with jolly nonchalance, Revali with a barely-concealed and burning desire to hear his name in song.  The title of Champion barely seems to affect Urbosa. Like Mipha—like Zelda—she must have been preparing for power of some kind or another for her entire life.

“It doesn’t need to be only voe who notice you,” Kondo suggests.  He’s heard the scandalized rumors about the long-unmarried Gerudo chief and how close she was to the Queen, even if that was all before his time.

“Possibly.”  Urbosa doesn’t contradict him completely, but she seems dismissive.  “You’re right about the short version. When the saying is shortened, when it’s only an entrance, then it can mean anything.  There is always a new room to enter and a new journey to begin.”

Kondo nods, and he stares ponderously into his own glass.  Somewhere over the course of this conversation, he’s fallen far behind Urbosa, who may soon be ready for her next Noble Pursuit.  “I feel similarly about the traditional Sheikah saying,” he says.

“Oh?”

“‘After a long day of work, you deserve a dry cup,’” Kondo intones.

“Dry cups,” Urbosa repeats.  She laughs, high and amused. “I’ve heard that one before.”

“Most Sheikah shorten it,” Kondo explains.  “The whole thing is too much of a mouthful for when all you want is a good night.”

“And you don’t think a long day of work is necessary to deserve a dry cup,” Urbosa guesses, with her usual incisive clarity.

“No.  I’ve never understood why it’s work we chose to acknowledge.  Why not a long day of love in your heart? Of pain in your soul?”

“Is that why you choose to drink?  Love in your heart and pain in your soul?”

Kondo sighs.  He hasn’t even had enough of the cocktail to blame his slip on the volt cactus liqueur.  He opens his mouth to protest that he hadn’t necessarily been talking about himself, but Urbosa beans him to it.  “It’s alright,” she says, her voice threaded with motherly concern. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

There’s no question that she knows.  Kondo built his life around beautiful words, and yet in that moment, he can barely bring himself to speak even the plainest, most utilitarian of sentences.  “Is it…” he stammers helplessly. “Who knows?”

“Not as many people as you’re afraid of.”  Urbosa pats his arm consolingly. “I’ve loved our little bird for a very long time.  Perhaps not in the same way you do, but, I promise you, just as fiercely. I can tell when other people realize just how special she is.”

Kondo doesn’t feel possessive over Princess Zelda, not precisely.  There wouldn’t be a point to it, not when he’s known since the day he met her that she could never be his.  It shouldn’t surprise him to learn that others love the princess, but for so long he’s watched her give away her heart, only to receive little more than duty and obligation in return.  The unfairness feels like an arrow twisting in his chest. Zelda deserves to have her love returned tenfold. She deserves to love someone who could be with her and someday rule by her side.  At the very least, she deserves to love someone who can bring himself to speak to her.

“I would die for her,” he whispers, a barely audible scratch over the hum of the tavern around them.  He hates that his voice sounds so ugly and bitter when he’s thinking about the princess. Every thought about her should be a song.

“So would I,” Urbosa says.  “So would Link.”

“It’s not the same,” Kondo spits, even though he knows she's right.  Link would die for Zelda. He’d already done so in a thousand other lives, if the stories were to be believed (and no one in Hyule knew better than Kondo that the stories were all real).  “He would die for any of us.”

“As would she.  You know as well as I do that she’s spent the last ten years slowly killing herself in search of that sealing power.”

Kondo can’t deny it.  Zelda’s steely determination in the face of so many years of failure is one of the things that makes her so real and special to him.  He’d write symphonies about it, if he didn’t know how much it would break her to hear her troubles immortalized in song.

“Maybe they deserve each other then,” Kondo spits.  He hears his own voice muffled, as though he were speaking underwater.  It’s something he’s never said aloud, and he can’t explain why he’s saying it here, to this Gerudo woman he barely knows.

“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make a certain sense,” she admits, and it feels like she may as well have snapped her fingers and electrocuted him on the spot.  Kondo is frozen.

“Fate has drawn them together,” Urbosa continues.  “No one else in Hyrule could understand their duties quite like the other.  Not even me or the other Champions. They’re both utterly devoted to the cause, and of course they’re both beautiful.”

“They even look alike,” Kondo mutters.  When he’d first arrived at Hyrule Castle, he’d wondered, though not for long, if it wasn’t the case that Hylians were just predisposed towards a certain fair, delicate beauty.  He’d soon realized that the princess and her knight were rare exceptions. It only took one night at a stable. The first time Kondo rode with Princess Zelda and her entourage, they’d stayed overnight in the wetlands along the way to Kakariko Village, and a group of Hylian stable girls couldn’t stop staring at the princess’s knight.  Surely, Link had noticed, but it hadn’t seemed to affect him at all, the same way Zelda’s attention had slid off of his back like water.

Kondo’s seen it happen again since then, more times than he’d like to recall, and he knows it’s about more than just knightly bravery.  Girls never paid Kondo that kind of attention (and neither did boys, for that matter), and it’s hard to imagine that things would be different if he had a sword on his hip instead of an ocarina.   He takes a feeble sip of his drink, and suddenly he understands what Urbosa meant about the hydromelons being overripe. The whole thing tastes too sweet in a way that it didn’t before.

“They will make a nice picture on a tapestry someday,” Urbosa suggests, and Kondo knows it’s true.  The castle weavers started their pieces documenting the tale of the princess’s fight against Ganon when he did.  He imagines twin figures, encircling a dark beast, brandishing magic and weaponry. There is no room for a poet on such a tapestry.

“You don’t have to remind me I’ve lost,” Kondo mutters darkly.

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“You may as well have.”

“I don’t think so.”  Urbosa taps her fingers along the wood of the bar, her nails clacking rhythmically.  Kondo has barely enough energy to be impressed at her seemingly natural sense of rhythm—of course a warrior would understand timing.  “Why do their roles in history mean you lose? Do her feelings for another mean you lose? Would you lose if they were lovers? You’re the one who said that a day of love in your heart is worth a drink.”

Kondo looks down into his cup.  The blushing pink liquid seems to tease him.  It could only be worse if someone plopped a big, heart-shaped slice of radish in front of him.

“In a way, loving someone who doesn’t feel the same helps me understand her more,” Kondo says softly.  “I know how she feels. Someday, maybe it will help me tell her story.”

“But you want to do more than tell the story,” Urbosa says.  Something softens in her sharp Gerudo features.

“I want to, but I can’t.” There are too many reasons why.  Kondo nods and takes a sip of that still-too-sweet drink.  The volt cactus liqueur tickles his throat as he swallows.

“We’re all trapped by fate and circumstance to some degree,” Urbosa says.  She pats his arm, and he can feel the warmth of her hand through his sleeve.  “Our duties, our limits. But we do what we can.  It doesn't mean we've lost.”

“Maybe a long day of love in your heart is no different from a long day of work because love _is_ work,” Kondo muses.  “My people were right all along, in a way.”

“And may you enter,” Urbosa adds.  “Into new understanding and new acceptance.”

“More work,” Kondo mutters.

“I can think of a princess who might argue for the value of work.”

Kondo can’t argue with her.

Urbosa glances out the window.  “And speaking of work, there’s another day of training and ceremonies ahead of us tomorrow,” she points out.  “So we should get back to the castle. Come on, I’ll walk with you.”

Only then does Kondo realize that, somehow, he’s reached the bottom of his cup.  He rises from his seat, and the wave of unsteadiness washing over him is another reminder that he has, indeed, been drinking.  Urbosa rises as well, but she doesn’t need to steady herself on the bar. She towers over him, though not by as much as she does over the Hylians.

“Thanks,” he says.  It feels right to say it.  “Not just for walking with me, but for the drink and for—”  He hiccups. “The conversation. If you’d like me to repay you, I have rupees.”

“I don’t need rupees.”  There’s a note of finality to Urbosa’s voice.  “What I wanted from you is reassurance that you’ll tell our princess’s story with love and compassion, and I’m more sure of that now than I ever was.”

Kondo swallows.  He can taste the shadow of the Noble Pursuit at the back of his throat, strong and sweet.  Princess Zelda’s story isn’t over yet, and he already knows it will be the hardest one he’ll ever tell.

“I promise that I will.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading. I’m a new fic writer and excited to dip my toes into the Zelda fandom. A few quick notes:
> 
> I named Kondo after the Nintendo composer and not everyone’s favorite organizing guru, although when I play, I often look at my weapons inventory and ask myself, “Does this Boko club spark joy?”
> 
> I interpret Link as asexual (and potentially some flavor of genderqueer, though that didn’t really come up), but it’s also possible Kondo is an unreliable narrator.
> 
> Hope you liked it!


End file.
